About Us

The Goodall Foundation (formally known as The Robin and Sylvia Goodall Charitable Foundation) is a UK educational charity with an international reach. It was founded in September 2016 by entrepreneur Andrew Goodall in honour of his parents.

Our Story

Meet Otilia and her baby son. In October 2006, a 70 year-old English woman called Syliva Goodall, was travelling around a remote part of northern Tanzania. At a hotel, she bumped into a young Tanzania woman called Otilia and her baby son. They were both en route to different places, doing different things, leading very different lives. But their worlds connected at that moment, and they have been connected ever since.

Sylvia Goodall took a quick photograph of Otilia with her son. On returning to England, she sent a copy of the photograph to Otilia, and from there they struck up a friendship. Sylvia later returned to Tanzania with her son, Andrew. When they arrived in Otilia’s village, they discovered a barren school and a community with limited resources. Otilia and her family and her community never expected any help from these wazungo, but both Sylvia and Andrew, and their family, felt honoured to enable them to improve education resources for the children of the village and their teachers, and many other things besides.

Since then, our founder Andrew has supported several charities working to advance education and to connect people in the UK with people in this region of Tanzania. Andrew founded The Robin & Sylvia Goodall Foundation in 2016, in honour of his parents, in order to further the range—in terms of both geography and impact—of his philanthropic work.

Our Focus

We bill ourselves as a “test and learn” organisation. As a charity what we care about is human flourishing and we want to learn what conditions are needed to maximise this. Each year, we come up with a series of sub research questions that we want to work on each year. For 2017 we are asking:

Is it more effective to enable young people to flourish by supporting:

projects that develop their skills and strengths;

projects that develop the capacity of those supporting them (eg teachers);

projects that provide the equipment and resources needed to thrive (eg good learning environments); or

projects that combine some or all of the above?

We have four charitable objects:

To advance education for anyone up to the age of 25;

To support young people to develop their skills, capacities and capabilities and to enable them find employment;

To relieve poverty and financial hardship; and

To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of charities and charitable projects.

Across all our projects we like to:

Catalyse innovation—creating space and providing the resources needed to develop and pilot new ideas that will be sustainable, scalable and replicable;

Connect diverse brains—bringing people together who have a range of expertise, knowledge and experience to shape, inform and evaluate projects happening on the ground;

Collaborate with others—partnering with committed and visionary delivery leads to implement projects and achieve measurable impact in the short and long term.

Our Criteria

We do not accept unsolicited funding proposals. We work proactively to find partners and support and develop projects that:

enable individuals to become self-sufficient in order to flourish and fulfil their potential;

are sustainable or have the intention of moving towards this;

are participatory—co-designed by the people the projects intend to support;

are innovative or scaling up;

are rooted in the community they seek to serve;

have measurable outcomes and an open approach to learning and reflection;

adopt a business/entrepreneurial mindset or are open to learning about how to have one;

have the potential to connect to Brighton in some way.

Our Model

We adopt a rounded view of who individuals are, how they live and what they need. We have developed a holistic impact model that allows us to have a multifaceted yet focused structure to our work.

There are three interconnected areas: Education (formal learning at school and elsewhere), Strengths & Skills (personal development and life skills), and Enterprise & Innovation (new, sustainable models of charitable activity). We particularly look to support projects whose approach intersects across two or three of these areas.

We are proud to be both an accredited Living Wage Employer as well as a Living Wage Friendly Funder.

(c) 2017 the Goodall Foundation | Proud to be a Living Wage organisation